The Rule She Kept After The House Closed

There were six of them and they kept the same hours for nine years.

It was not a monastery and there was nothing grand about it. Six people, four households, one diary and a set of times, and a short list of things they had agreed to do at those times whether they felt like it or not.

It worked. That has to be said, because from the outside it sounds like the sort of thing people do for eighteen months and quietly abandon. It worked for nine years and it changed all six of them.

Then a job moved. Then a marriage went through something. Then one of them died, which was the hardest and the least surprising, because he was eighty one. Then a house sold and somebody went four hours north.

By the spring of the sixth year there was one.

She still keeps every hour of it.

Half six. The middle one, which is the awkward one. The evening one, which is the one she would keep if she could only keep one. The Friday thing. The thing in the first week of the month that takes two hours and that she has never once explained to anybody.

Here is what she has not said out loud, on a coast path or anywhere else.

Nobody would know if she stopped.

There is no list she is on. Nobody rings. There is no group and there has not been for six years and there is no version of the future where there is one again. If she went back to bed at half six tomorrow, the total number of people in the world who would notice is zero.

And she got up anyway this morning, the way she has got up every morning, and she stood in her own kitchen in the dark and could not tell you whether what she was doing was faithfulness or an inability to let go of six people.

If you are keeping a shape nobody else keeps, come and lean on this gate. There is a flask and nobody out here is going to ask what the hours are.

The line a man said in a ruined city

There is a sentence written by somebody sitting in the wreckage of everything his people had built, and the striking thing is what he says he still has.

The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.Lamentations 3:24

A portion is what a person is allotted. It is the word for the share a family got when the land was divided, the thing that identified them and that a whole life got built on top of.

His portion is gone. The city is down. The share, the land, the arrangement, the whole visible thing.

And he says the Lord is my portion. Not the Lord will restore my portion. The Lord is the portion, and He always was, and the ruin has done him the terrible favor of showing him what was actually allotted to him.

You are holding a portion that did not disperse in the spring. Lamentations 3:24 has a man in a ruined city naming God Himself as the share he was given, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that line inside a book of grief rather than tidying it into a psalm of victory, which means what you have been keeping the hours for was never the six of you.

What a rule is actually for

Now let us be exact about the diary, because everything turns on what it was.

A rule of life is a shape. It is scaffolding. Nobody has ever loved scaffolding, and nobody is meant to.

The six of you did not agree to those hours because the hours were valuable. You agreed to them because a person on their own drifts, and a person with a shape and five other people keeps turning up to something worth turning up to.

The hours were pointing at somebody. They were never the somebody.

You have been turning up to a Person for fifteen years, and for the last six He has been the only one there because He is the one it was always for. John 15:4 says abide in me, and I in you, and the abiding is put in Christ Himself rather than in a company of people doing it together, and it is the same Spirit by whom He dwells in a believer, so the half six in a dark kitchen is not the remains of something. It is the thing.

The question about faithfulness and letting go

Here is the question that has been sitting on the coast path for six years, and it deserves a straight answer.

Is this faithfulness, or an inability to let go of six people?

Look at what the answer would have to depend on. If it were about the six, the hours would have got harder to keep as the memory of them faded, and they have not. If it were about the group, the two hour thing in the first week of the month would have been the first to go, and it is the one you have never missed.

You were never keeping those hours for a group, and the evidence is that the group has been gone six years and the hours are intact. Matthew 6:6 says enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and it is written of somebody alone with the door shut rather than of somebody in a company, and it is the Holy Spirit who meets a person in a room nobody is watching.

Grief for the six is real and it is allowed and it is not what has been getting you up.